by D A Fowler
She smiled at Nancy. “We could have that dick Montgomery over a barrel if we wanted to. If we tell the same story.”
Nancy’s eyes widened. “Same story? What are you talking about?”
“What do you think I’m talking about? He kept us after school for two hours. We could say he tried to talk us into doing him…certain favors. And if we really want to hang him, we can say that he succeeded.”
They were in front of Nancy’s house; Marla pulled up to the curb and parked. Nancy was eyeing her friend with genuine admiration. “You’re a genius, Marla. We could. We could get the bastard fired. We’d be heroes.”
“My dad would kill him,” Marla mused, creating the entire scenario in her mind to search for any possible defects in the plan. Harold Mingee’s reaction would be nothing less than explosive. Yet there was a small but dangerous hitch…Dennis. He knew the truth, and since he was mad at her, there existed the possibility of his blowing the charade. Also, now that she really thought about it, she didn’t know for certain if her and Nancy’s popularity would survive the fire of such a scandal; some things were acceptable, some weren’t, and being linked with the likes of Dr. Doom in a sexual manner definitely wouldn’t be. The last thing they’d want would be the rest of the seniors to start calling them Dr. Doom’s whores. She quickly began to backpedal.
“Well, maybe I should just call Montgomery at home tonight and tell him we will do that if he takes us to Greer’s office in the morning. If he buys the threat, that’ll take care of our problem without creating any new ones. I just realized a thing like that could really get out of hand. I think we could do without the additional hassle.”
Nancy expelled a long breath, a mixture of anger and disappointment. “I should’ve known you’d back down. You always talk big, but when the curtain goes up, your butt is nowhere on stage. I’ll bet you even chicken out of going to the graveyard Saturday night…but I tell you what: if you do, then I’ll just go by myself. And I, Nancy Snell, will be the most famous person at Sharon Valley High.”
Marla gasped. “Hey, we can’t tell anyone about that! I’m serious, Nan. You know how much trouble we could get into for breaking into a tomb? Plenty, I promise you. Don’t be stupid.”
“I can’t even tell Jay?” Nancy pouted, thinking how impressed her boyfriend would be. “What trouble can we get into anyway, with your dad a lawyer and the judge his hunting buddy? Oh my. We might get out little hands spanked, but that would be about the extent of it. What fun is it going to be if nobody else knows we did it? You are going to back out, aren’t you? I knew it. Call me stupid, but at least I’m not a chickenshit. If you won’t even try to get Montgomery fired, I know you won’t go through with something like that.”
“I’m not backing out of it,” Marla insisted heatedly, qualifying her statement with, “out of going to the graveyard, I mean.” Nancy, in her opinion, was far too impulsive, and she had a bad habit of doing before thinking, which was the cause of many of their troubles. Stupidity was Nancy’s middle name, whether she admitted it or not. Marla wasn’t afraid to do anything, but she couldn’t just throw all precaution to the wind, unless of course the consequences of getting caught were minimal. Most people found themselves in over their heads, she knew, because they acted on plans that had only been hatched, not carefully thought out. Just because she was careful didn’t mean she was a chickenshit.
“If it ever got back to my dad, he’d kill me, Nancy. Don’t you know how embarrassing that would be to him? I promise I’m not going to back out, but it would really be a stupid move on our part to let anyone else know about this. We’re doing it for us, for our own curiosity. We’ll find out things—maybe—that nobody else will ever know. Isn’t that enough for you? And as for Montgomery, I would love to see that jerk get fired, or run over by a Mack truck, for that matter, but you’re not looking down the road at what could happen. I know it was my idea, but it was a bad one and I should have just kept my mouth shut until I thought it through. If we say he actually did something, they might make us get physicals, in which case they’d find out we lied. They might make us all take lie detector tests, and how’s it going to look when Montgomery passes with flying colors and our graphs look like the Grand Tetons? That’s what it would boil down to—our word against his. This thing could backfire on us really bad. I think the best we can do is try to bluff him.”
Nancy shrugged, unable, as usual, to defy Marla’s logic. “I guess you’re right. Well, before I go, I meant to ask you…did Stevie really say he wasn’t going to do your homework anymore? We won’t have time to go to the bathroom this weekend if we have to do all this crap Doom assigned us. Jay sure won’t help me. But if we get suspended, I guess it won’t matter if we get it done or not.”
“I just told Dennis that, since he was acting like such a turd.” Marla smiled. “For a dollar an hour, Stevie will do anything I tell him. Maybe everything will work out. It sure as hell better. If we do end up getting suspended, I wonder if there’s some way we could keep our parents from finding out. If the school just sends a notice in the mail or something, we could maybe snatch it out before they see it. But if they make a phone call, I guess we’re nailed. We’d better prepare to meet our doom.”
Nancy’s expression turned sour. “Not me, M and M. If worse comes to worse, I’ll just run away for a day or two. My folks would be so glad to see me when I came home, they’d forget about punishing me.” She opened the passenger door and got out, giving Marla a brief wave as she headed up the sidewalk in front of her house, a brown clapboard with white trim. Nancy’s father was a watch and jewelry repairman, and had transformed the garage into his shop. His meager income dictated that the Snells had to live on the eastern side of the valley, where the homes were smaller and older and generally run-down. Nancy’s mother worked, but only as a volunteer at the small local hospital. It was the inheritance Nancy had gotten from her maternal grandparents that would soon allow her to walk the halls of Princeton.
Marla tapped her horn and drove away, knowing exactly where Nancy was planning to hide out if worse came to worst, and wondering what would happen if on top of getting suspended she was caught harboring a fugitive from parental justice.
Pamela Mingee, Marla’s mother, nodded at the RN behind the nurse’s station as she turned the corner of the nursing home lobby. She walked, as always, with her back straight and her chin slightly uplifted. A single glance told anyone who looked at her that she was a woman of class who occupied an enviable niche in society. No Kmart fashions for this one; only the best could be good enough, even if that meant a shopping trip to Paris. Nature had apparently foreseen her elevated station in life and accordingly granted her a face and complexion worthy of the finest makeup and jewelry, and similarly a full head of glossy black hair which demanded carefully maintained coiffures in the latest styles.
“She’s had a pretty bad day,” the nurse warned Pamela with a frown. “Threw her oatmeal on the wall this morning, cursing a blue streak at someone who wasn’t there. We finally got her calmed down, but she started up again this afternoon. Thought you’d better know.”
Cold fingers of sorrow clutched around Pamela’s heart, and she almost changed her mind about making the visit. Seeing her mother behave in such a manner was almost more than she could take. “What’s she upset about this time?” she asked wearily. “It’s not the alien thing again, is it?”
On several occasions during the past few months, Jasmine Colter had sworn that men from outer space had been talking to her through her radio and were threatening to come get her. Pamela had sought to end the problem by taking the radio away, but that only served to transfer the alien signals to the television set. Pamela gave up; she imagined that even in a completely bare room her mother would manage to “hear” strange messages, through the walls if nothing else.
The nurse, Meg Boyd, shook her head. “No, it’s not that…she’s back on Morganna Ober again. Sa
id she’s been coming to her room all dressed in black and wearing a witch’s hat, trying to make her drink bat’s blood.”
Tears sprang to Pamela’s eyes; the nurse saw them and realized how callous she’d been, how careless of the woman’s feelings; Jasmine was, after all, her mother. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Mingee! Lord, I have such a big mouth sometimes. I understand how upsetting this is; really, I do. I went through pretty much the same thing with my father. After being retired from the postal service for twenty years, he all of a sudden thought he was back on the job, and we’d catch him going up and down the street sticking Mama’s recipes in people’s mailboxes. I guess I was just thinking it would be better if you were prepared. Try not to take it so hard, dear. It’s just part of growing old.” Behind the thick round lenses framed in pink her eyes were full of sympathy.
Pamela nodded and swallowed the lump in her throat, an unbidden vision of herself in a nursing home one day causing her to shudder slightly. She decided to go on to her mother’s room; another part of growing old shouldn’t be getting deserted by your own children. Pamela’s two older brothers, now living in other states, hadn’t been back to visit their mother in over two years.
Jasmine was propped up on her pillows, her gnarled hands clutching tightly to the railing on her bed although she appeared to be asleep. She looked so tiny and frail to her daughter, it seemed that time had withered the once-robust woman away to almost nothing, yet none of her former spunk and surprisingly little of her strength had been lost with age. A broken hip, stubbornly refusing to mend, had made her a prisoner of her own body, but her mind and mouth remained unquenchably active. Pamela stepped quietly into the antiseptic-smelling room and whispered softly, “Mama?”
The old woman’s faded blue eyes flew open. “Close the door!” she rasped desperately. “Hurry, close the door before she gets in! I can hear her coming!”
“Don’t get upset, Mama; I’ll close the door.” Pamela released the stop at the base of the door and closed it just as one of the nurse’s aides walked by. Was that who her mother had feared would come in? No, she was talking about Morganna again. Morganna, the wicked witch of Sharon Valley.
Pamela felt her chest tighten as she walked toward the bed and sat in the green vinyl chair next to it. “How do you feel today, Mama?”
“Did you lock the door? Did you lock it?” Jasmine shrilled hoarsely, spraying spittle on her daughter’s arm.
“Yes, I locked it,” Pamela lied, fighting to keep her voice light. “Just relax, Mama. You’re perfectly safe.”
“No, she’s going to get me. Morganna’s going to come back and pull me right into—oh look, Pammie, a butterfly.”
Pamela glanced around the room. There was, of course, no butterfly. Her mother appeared calm for a moment, watching the insect only her eyes could see. But it must have disappeared, because the look of alarm returned and she whispered frantically, “She told me never to tell her secret, but I’m a’tellin’ it, and I just know she’s not gonna stand for that.” Her withered hands clutched at the covers, the large blue veins webbed on their surfaces protruding more than usual in her state of excitement. “She’s a witch, I tell you! They were all witches,” she continued, shaking her head. “Took Sarah Kennedy’s baby and sacrificed it to the Devil. Drank its blood .. .”
Pamela covered her face with her hands. “Oh Mama, please. Don’t…”
“You think they done that for nothing?” her mother asked despairingly, wagging her finger at Pamela’s chest. “You think that was the end of it when they—”
“That was the end of it, Mother. That was a long time ago. It’s over,” Pamela said, lowering her hands to reveal the tear tracks etched in her makeup. Her voice cracked with strain. “Please just forget about it. Everyone else has.”
“Everybody else didn’t get befriended by Morganna Ober,” Jasmine said stubbornly, her toothless lips laboring to form the correct sounds. “Only me, but I couldn’t tell you why. I was afraid, but so help me God A’mighty, I couldn’t tell her to leave me alone. I couldn’t, Pammie. I’ze afraid of what she’d do to me if I got her mad. I knew what she could do. I never brung up what happened on the hill that night, but she said to me one day that her mother had the consumption, and she couldn’t get her body rid of it. That’s what I figure that devilment they done was all about. Little Jeremy’s life in exchange for hers…”
Pamela burst into loud sobs. “Stop it! I can’t stand to hear any more of this! There are no such things as witches, Mother. That’s just a bunch of old silly superstition. Do you hear me? Myrantha and Nathaniel Ober have been dead for seventy years, and Morganna…just forget about her. She doesn’t even live in this town anymore. And she hasn’t been coming to see you…my God, she’s at least as old as you are, and probably in a wheelchair. She can’t harm you, Mama. What the Obers did has nothing to do with you or me or anything else. Not then, today, or ever. That’s all in the past.”
“Oh no, Pammie, you’re wrong about that,” Jasmine sputtered, her ancient heart beating with dread. “Myrantha never got what she paid for, and I—”
“I’m sorry, Mama, I have to go.” Pamela stumbled from her chair and rushed from the room, the rantings of her senile mother following her down the hallway.
Three
Lana sprawled out on the living room carpet to rest, and was soon joined by her mother, who preferred the couch, and her twelve-year-old brother Luke. All their possessions were now in the new house, but most of the boxes still needed to be unpacked, the contents put away. No one seemed exactly anxious to jump into the chore.
“I’m so thirsty,” Lana croaked. “I’d give about anything for a nice cold Coke.”
“Your stereo?” Luke asked hopefully. “I’ll go out and get you one if you’ll gimme your stereo.” His impish face cracked into a wide grin, and with his hair, also blond, cowlicked upward in back, he reminded her of Dennis the Menace. Accent on Menace.
“Oh shut up, you little creep.”
“Lana!”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“I could use a Coke myself,” Carol Bremmers sighed, closing her eyes to erase the view of the catastrophe surrounding her. “But I doubt at this point I could even walk out to the car. Bet I wake up stiff as a board tomorrow.”
Luke grinned impishly. “Good. Then we won’t have to get enrolled in school.”
“No such luck, young man. Tomorrow you get enrolled and Monday you start. This isn’t a vacation,” Carol reminded her twelve-year-old son, who resembled his father so much she sometimes found it painful to look at him. On the other hand Lana had taken after her, and until the last five years or so they had frequently been mistaken as sisters.
He groaned in protest, but knew there was no escape from the dreaded fate. The fact that he was actually required by law to attend school appalled him.
“I feel so sorry for that guy next door,” Lana said, stretching her tired, achy muscles. “I wonder if he goes to my school. He told me all the kids call him Tardo.”
Luke cracked up. “Tardo? What, is he retarded or somethin’?”
“Not as much as you, bird brain.”
Carol quickly reached the point of exasperation; her children’s constant bickering at times had her picturing a noose around her neck—or theirs. The move apparently hadn’t helped matters in that regard one whit. “Kids, I’m not in the mood…”
“You’re the retard, Lana—”
“Shut your face!”
Carol bolted up from the couch, her exhaustion from the physical and mental strain of moving halfway across the country to a town completely unfamiliar to her had tapped her reservoir of patience into nonexistence. She was ready to knock some heads together.
“Listen, you two. Any more of that and I’m sending you both to your rooms. Can’t you give me a minute’s peace?”
“I still think it’s crappy for people like tha
t to get teased,” Lana continued, daring her sibling to make another wisecrack. “It’s not fair. If he does go to my school and I hear anyone callin’ him names, I think I’ll walk right up an’ slap the snot out of ’em. God knows, if Spiro wanted to, he could knock a person clean into the next county, but I can tell he’s too sweet.”
Luke started making kissing noises against the back of his hand and taunting, “Lana’s got a boyfriend, Lana’s got a—”
“That’s it, boy, go to your room,” Carol barked. “I warned you!”
“But Mom!” he protested.
“Now! March!”
Luke got up and stalked down the hall toward the bedrooms, stomping on the floor, muttering unintelligible curses under his breath. Lana made no attempt to conceal her glee. “Ah, peace at last.”
“It takes two to tango,” her mother replied sharply, whipping out one of her many loved cliches. “I don’t understand why you two have to constantly be at each other’s throats. And don’t give me that innocent look, young lady—you start these things at least half the time. Sometimes I think you both do it just to drive me crazy.”
Lana rolled her eyes to the ceiling, one of her much loved expressions in response to unjust persecution. “I’m really sure, Mom.”
“Then why? Does it really take that much effort to get along?”
“I guess so.” Lana stretched again, wishing for the millionth time she’d been an only child. Her mother had once admitted that Luke had been an “accident”—a fact Lana had wasted no time in repeating to her nemesis— so if her mother had just been a little more careful, life, as far as Lana was concerned, would be infinitely more pleasant. Perhaps her parents would even have stayed together. “You mind if I go out for a little walk, see if any girls my age live around here?”